Why I Drive

The truth is- and this is the thing that I’ve been afraid to admit even to myself until right now- that I’m afraid to die. It’s not the dying that scares me- no, I’ve made my peace with that- even the pain that it may involve. What scares me is what I’ll miss out on. Walking Nora down the aisle and and lying in a tent with the kids listening to the pitter-patter of the rain and stroking my wife’s hair. How much life will I not get to experience if cancer takes me too early?

And in this fear everything becomes so precious. Every time Nora giggles I just treasure it, because it may be the last time. Every basketball game or family dinner at home together or listening to Wyatt pray- it’s all so precious.

I could die on the operating table two days from now. Or complications a few days after that could take me. Or maybe I’ll beat it this time but it’ll come back with a vengeance years from now and I lose the battle that time. I just can’t escape the reality that this could be it. It was easier early on in my treatment, because there was still lots of time and options left to deal with this, but now all my eggs are pretty much in this basket. And it’s hard not to play out images in my head of things going wrong- my kids growing up with a different father and all kinds of things. If this doesn’t work then I’m going to have to start talking to doctors about how much time I have left.

And this is what keeps me up at night- why I am driving around at two in the morning on a bitter cold night listening to country music I don’t even like.

But it doesn’t always seem so bleak. Sometimes I’m able to believe that even if I do die, things will work out like they should. But that’s a pretty tiny percentage of the time. Increasingly often, I’ve been experiencing this thing called faith. I know, it’s a stupid word that’s been pirated by those who would use it as a a meaningless byword to describe something they don’t understand, and it irritates me even now. It’s such Christianese that I just want to puke when I hear it.

But Doug talked on Sunday about faith and Abraham and I began to actually understand what it means. More specifically, Doug talked about how Abraham had faith in things not yet seen, and it was credited to him as righteousness. So faith is believing something that you shouldn’t. And it occurred to me that there’s a whole long list of stories in the bible of people who have faith in a lot of stupid things. People who believed that God was on their side when they were going to war, even though, if you think about it, the people on the other side were probably saying exactly the same thing. People who believed that God wanted them to possess this certain piece of land even though there were already people on it who weren’t really any worse than the they were. People who believed God would give them babies when, biologically speaking, that really shouldn’t be happening. And on an on, story after story, God seems to be trying to tell us that He really values this faith thing, cheap as the word may have become these days.

And I think that maybe now, sitting up in the middle of the night because I can’t sleep for thinking about all the terrible things that might occur two days from now, God is asking me to believe in stupid things too. He’s asking me to believe that good still happens in a broken world and that, at the end of all of this, there’s more beauty to be found than we can even imagine. He’s asking me to believe that He is for me and that I am loved despite my deepest doubts and that He can see me through even this. He’s asking me to believe that He is so good that one day we’ll look back on this shit world and it won’t even matter that much in comparison to the glory that surrounds us. We’ll be drenched in light and coolness like a summer sunrise, early sunrise just a minute or two before the sun appears.

I think that’s what’s being asked of me, and I sort of believe it. God I hope I get to hear that pitter-patter on the tent one day.